Dear friends,
I sincerely hope all is well with you and yours.
Indeed, this is an unexpected mass-mailer. Please forgive the unsolicited rambles that follow.
To start, there are many of you who have outstanding orders with me at this time. Some of you have been waiting for a while, and I wish to apologize for that. Please don't worry. Each and every one of these outstanding orders will be tended to this week. You have my word.
I appreciate your patience and understanding.
Second, there has been considerable buzz surrounding the new Beatles remasters, due for release in September. There should be. We have all been waiting for this day, and it is about to arrive - finally! Thanks to a long-time supporter and friend to this project, I have had the opportunity to hear genuine samples of the new remasters due out in two months.
They are good.
Very good.
Those of you who will be buying them - and those of you who have already preordered - will not be disappointed.
In fact, I will venture to guess than many of you will be more than pleasantly surprised at how good they sound.
And with what promises to be outstanding packaging all around, it will be a collector's nirvana.
From the outset of the Dr. Ebbetts Sound Systems project, I swore that once EMI did the right thing and released remasters to be proud of, I would not continue doing what I was doing. After all, the only reason I did this was because Apple/EM /Capitol would not - and because I so very much love the Beatles.
While my love for the band has not changed, everything else has.
EMI/Capitol began their release of the American LPs on compact disc a few years ago, and now EMI has tackled the British catalogue in fullest detail.
It's what we all wanted. As Beatles fans, it's what we've prayed for.
To that end - and with the heaviest of hearts - effective immediately, Dr. Ebbetts Sound Systems will cease operations.
Many of you will recall that the entire purpose of the Dr. Ebbetts project was to make available to the public the best sounding versions of the Beatles' original LP releases - with emphasis on the American and British catalogues. Believe me, it wasn't a hard thing to do considering the substandard quality of the original CD catalogue from 1987 onward.
The fact of the matter is, the Dr. Ebbetts material does not - and will not - sound better than what is coming commercially in September. People I trust agree with me. The remasters sound remarkably well balanced, with solid, punchy bass, smooth mids and not-to-harsh, yet crisp highs. In comparison, many of the Ebbetts masters fall short - weaker bass, dimished mids, and often too-bright highs.
It's a given that the remasters will not please everyone, but they will be good enough to make the Ebbetts catalogue solidly inferior.
The artwork and packaging of the EMI material will prove to make current Dr. Ebbetts releases look like Xerox machine fodder.
It pains me, seeing as I have invested so much time in this thing, but I humbly and officially put this nearly-fourteen year project to bed.
I have outlived my usefulness in this hobby.
I know there are many who will ask why I just don't continue releasing titles that are NOT being put out by Apple/EMI - foreign releases, rare pressings, etc..
My reasons are complicated, but they are what they are. In short, if the Dr. Ebbetts BLUE BOX set is not the definitive sounding version of the original UK stereo LPs, then why issue them at all?
Many will remember the original BEAT CDs of the 1990s that presented the Beatles US LPs sourced from cassettes. I surely do. They became immediately obsolete with the advent of Dr. Ebbetts. No one bought those BEAT CDs anymore when I came along. Why would they? At the time, my material was far superior.
The Ebbetts BLUE BOX series was only issued because Apple/EMI's versions were substantially inferior to anything I - or any number of needledroppers - were putting out. The Ebbetts BLUE BOX set is at THE HEART of the Dr. Ebbetts Sound Systems collection, in my estimation. If that set is now inferior to the commercial release, then it has no business existing. Suffice to say, I would not release the BLUE BOX set today if new remasters were already commercially available.
I would have no need.
And if my CORE SET is inferior, I don't wish to have the rest of the catalogue branded as such either.
Therefore, it is time to put it all on the shelf.
I am requesting that all of you who have LPs with me contact me as soon as possible and let me know which ones are yours so that I might send them back to you. I promise I will get those to you in short order.
So that your return LP requests will not be lost in what promises to be a hectic e-mail shuffle, please put "MY LPs" somewhere in the subject line.
Your generosity, kindness and willingness to share your treasured possessions with me is something I shall never forget.
To each and every one of you who has supported me and befriended me throughout the years, I wish to extend my deepest gratitude. Your loyalty has moved me beyond words. This entire project began as a fanciful hobby many years ago and has mushroomed into something far beyond anything I could have imagined.
From every corner of the entire world, I have been blessed to meet some of the best Beatle people out there. I will never forget you.
But now it is time to make way for the "big boys."
Please be sure to secure your copies of the remasters. I guarantee they will replace your Dr. Ebbetts CDs in your rotations and playlists - as they should. Display them proudly and let people know who the greatest band of all time is.
Remember, quoting my project motto from all those years ago, it is ONLY about the music.
That is why I do what I do today.
Now go put your hard-earned money to good use!
God Bless.
Drew
The person I failed to help is being transferred right now to the LA County Coroners office for his Autopsy.
All of my indifference and detachment that I worked so hard to achieve over the years has just gone into the bowels of hell and right now I am gutted.
I am going to say now what I have never said before because I want the truth out there for once.
Our relationship was not "a sham" as is being reported in the press. It was an unusual relationship yes, where two unusual people who did not live or know a "Normal life" found a connection, perhaps with some suspect timing on his part. Nonetheless, I do believe he loved me as much as he could love anyone and I loved him very much.
I wanted to "save him" I wanted to save him from the inevitable which is what has just happened.
His family and his loved ones also wanted to save him from this as well but didn't know how and this was 14 years ago. We all worried that this would be the outcome then.
At that time, In trying to save him, I almost lost myself.
He was an incredibly dynamic force and power that was not to be underestimated.
When he used it for something good, It was the best and when he used it for something bad, It was really, REALLY bad.
Mediocrity was not a concept that would even for a second enter Michael Jackson's being or actions.
"Another time, he came back from Tower Records with 11 boxes of records. In the boxes, there were no less than three copies of "Off the Wall", Michael Jackson's first solo album. Exactly why did you buy three, I asked him? "Well, it was so good! I just kept thinking I had to be sure to pick up a copy, and I was in a rush, I couldn't remember what I had already got, but I thought, well if I get more than one, I can give it to people as a gift."Une vraie victime du show-biz, coincé par un talent trop immense, et qui, pour enrichir sa famille, aura ultimement vécu une vie de malheurs.
Maybe this quote from Paul Desmond is new to some: "At the time I really thought it was a kind of a throwaway," Desmond later reflected. "I was ready to trade the entire rights, lifetime-wise of Take Five for a used Ronson electric razor. And the thing that makes Take Five work is the bridge, which we almost didn't use. We really came within...I shudder to think how close we came to not using that, because I said 'Well, I got this theme that we could use for a middle part.' And Dave said 'Well, let's run through it." And that bridge is what made Take Five."
"The Rudy Van Gelder sound recipe? That's easy. Take three or four expensive German mics with a blistering top end boost, put them real close to the instruments, add some extra distortion from a cheap overloading mic preamp through an Army surplus radio console, put some crappy plate reverb on it, and record. Then, immediately (and for no good reason), redub the master onto a Magnatone tape deck at +6, compressing the crap out of it while adding 5 db at 5000 cycles to everything. That's the Van Gelder Sound to me".Et pourtant... combien de disques immortels! Rudy qui privilégiait d'abord et avant tout le confort de ses musiciens. Comme quoi le son et la musique ne font pas toujours bon ménage.
Et, joie ultime, Sony (qui possède le catalogue) lance sur le marché de copieuses rééditions: les 50th Anniversary Legacy Editions.
The crown jewel of this edition, however, has to be the bonus disc featuring the same quartet from Time Out in various performances at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1961, '63 and '64. It's hard to describe the thrill of listening to this classic ensemble playing at its very best and to audiences whose enthusiasm equals that of the performers on stage. Highlights include the haunting, noir-ish "Koto Song," as well as Brubeck's magnificent solo work on "Pennies From Heaven."
... de la part de Chris, sur le forum Stevehoffman.tv:
Here, here. With all the hype and exposure, it's probably a bit of a victim of its own success as the saying goes, making it easy to overlook what a delightful album it is. Brilliant concept for an album, execution well up to the task. Such melodic work, immesurably important to its success, that belies - to some - the nuts and bolts of the central theme of working with the time. It's also done so much more than its share for winning ears to give jazz a further listen.
Teo Macero, futur architecte du très complexe travail d'édition de Bitches Brew a le rasoir agile... On entend nettement un travail d'édition, à 1:51 de Take Five.
10. Where Is My Mind par The Pixies - Fight Club (1999)
9. Cucurrucucu Paloma par Tomas Mendez - Parle avec elle (2002)
8. Edge Of Reality par Elvis Presley - Live A Little, Love A Little (1968)
7. Everybody’s Talking par Harry Nilsson - Midnight Cowboy (1969)
6. Jump Into The Fire par Harry Nilsson - GoodFellas (1990)
5. Tubular Bells par Mike Oldfield - The Exorcist (1973)
4. Going Home : Theme Of The Local Hero par Mark Knopfler / Hoppipola par Sigur Rós - Local Hero (1983) / Heima (2007)
3. Falling Slowly par Glen Hansard et Marketa Irglova - Once (2006)
2. She Smiled Sweetly / Ruby Tuesday par les Rolling Stones - The Royal Tenenbaums (2002)
J'ai mis en gras ceux que je connais et que j'aime vraiment beaucoup. Et j'ajouterais: les Poissons de Saint-Saëns, utilisé à satiété dans Days of Heaven (et en ouverture de tous les films à Cannes) et Georgia On My Mind de Ray Charles et la Symphonie du Nouveau Monde, les deux dans l'excellent et méconnu Four Friends de Arthur Penn (l'oncle de Sean).
Quant à Nancy Wilson, pour ceux qui la connaissent pas: la blonde à gauche. Crazy On You!
Street Fighting Man was all acoustics. There's no electric guitar parts in it. (Even the high-end lead part was through) a cassette player with no limiter. Just distortion. Just two acoustics, played right into the mike, and hit very hard. There's a sitar in the back, too. That would give the effect of the high notes on the guitar. And Charlie was playing his little 1930s drummer's practice kit. It was all sort of built into a little attaché case, so some drummer who was going to his gig on the train could open it up - with two little things about the size of small tambourines without the bells on them, and the skin was stretched over that. And he set up this little cymbal, and this little hi-hat would unfold. Charlie sat right in front of the microphone with it. I mean, this drum sound is massive. When you're recording, the size of things has got nothing to do with it. It's how you record them. Everything there was totally acoustic. The only electric instrument on there is the bass guitar, which I overdubbed afterwards.Ah les années '60: formidables! Imaginez les Stones enregistrant sur un petit cassette deck aujourd'hui. Not a chance!-Keith Richards, 1977
Au fait, pour les amateurs de mono, sachez que Beggar's Banquet en mono est un "fold-down" de la version stéréo, exceptée deux pièces, qui ont leur propre mixage mono, et ce sont évidemment les deux singles: Sympathy for the Devil et Street Fighting Man. Ces deux versions n'existent pas en CD... mais... Mais vous trouverez un mixage mono alternatif de Street Fighting Man, qui fut pour un temps très court la version single US, sur le triple SACD Singles Collection, que j'écoute ne ce moment... et qui donne à la version stéréo des allures de disque de démonstration hifi, c'est tout dire. Presque pas écoutable... Mais quel single!
Et pour rester dans la note bleue de la six-cordes, dans un registre plus mélanco, comme coda, sorte de chandelle sonore qui vous rend tout cire chaude, j'ai laissé les notes du Soul Lament de Kenny Burrell envahir la pièce dans l'obscurité. Kenny Burrell est un guitariste de jazz de la belle époque de Blue Note, et son disque Midnight Blue est paraît-il un de ses plus connus. La délicatesse du phrasé, la tonalité à la fois opaque et chaude, c'est de toute beauté. Si Soul Lament est mélanco à souhait et se livre en solo, le reste du disque est plus "hot" et hard: un Blue Note typique, de 1963, avec l'omni-présent Rudy van Gelder à la console, et Stanley Turrentine au sax (ténor? alto? Si c'est un ténor, il a le souffle drôlement agile), une section rythmique à trois. Mais c'est d'abord la guitare de Burrell qu'on entend, aussi distinctive qu'une voix humaine. Paraît-il que le remastering de RVG est l'une des réussites de sa série très contestée. En tout cas, la musique est belle, ne vous en privez pas.
Finalement, finissons sur un moment de grâce divine, parce que c'est beau la sueur, la souffrance, le sexe et tout ce qui nourrit le blues et ses variantes; mais de temps en temps, la beauté éthérée d'un grand morceau classique, ça nous rappelle qu'il y a paraît-il des parcelles de Dieu égarées dans notre ventre, et qui remontent jusqu'à notre cerveau. Vous connaissez des morceaux divins? Je voudrais vous en faire partager quelques-uns, mais pour l'heure (il est très tard), un seul...
Do you see any signs of future vitality in high-end audio?
Vitality? Don't make me laugh. Audio as a hobby is dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me, because I am associated by so many people with the mess my disciples made of spreading my gospel. For the record: I never, ever claimed that measurements don't matter. What I said (and very often, at that) was, they don't always tell the whole story. Not quite the same thing.
Remember those loudspeaker shoot-outs we used to have during our annual writer gatherings in Santa Fe? The frequent occasions when various reviewers would repeatedly choose the same loudspeaker as their favorite (or least-favorite) model? That was all the proof needed that [blind] testing does work, aside from the fact that it's (still) the only honest kind. It also suggested that simple ear training, with DBT confirmation, could have built the kind of listening confidence among talented reviewers that might have made a world of difference in the outcome of high-end audio.
"We seem to have come to a tacit agreement that it's no longer necessary, or even desirable, for a home music system to sound like the real thing. We speak in hushed and reverent tones about reproducing the ineffable beauty of music, when in fact much real music is harsh and vulgar and ugly. We design the all-important musical midrange out of our equipment in order to try—vainly, I might add—to recreate the illusion of three-dimensional space through what is essentially a two-dimensional reproducer. And whenever we hear a loudspeaker or a CD player that shows subversive signs of sounding more 'alive' or 'realistic' than most, we dismiss it out of hand as being too 'forward' or 'aggressive.' As if a lot of real music isn't forward and aggressive!
"The idea that all we are trying to do is make equipment that gives the listener some sort of magical emotional response to a mystical experience called 'music' is all well and good, but it isn't what High End is all about. In fact, high fidelity was originally a reaction to the gorgeously rich-sounding console 'boom boxes' that dominated the home-music market during the 1940s!
"We've lost our direction....The High End in 1992 is a multi-million-dollar business. But it's an empty triumph, because we haven't accomplished what we set out to do. The playback still doesn't sound 'just like the real thing.' People, let's start getting back to basics. Let's put the 're' back into 'reproduction.' Let's promote products that dare to sound as 'alive' and 'aggressive' as the music they are trying to reproduce."
Les disques de chanteur avec orchestre ne sont pas toujours des galettes reposantes. Frank Sinatra et Billie Holiday ont offert des albums déchirants (et un peu déprimants) sous cette formule; Diana, elle, nous offre de la langueur, et elle y met tout le considérable goût dont elle a hérité, sans oublier le considérable talent de ses collaborateurs et son joli timbre de voix, avec cette tessiture juste assez rauque pour suggérer qu'on a affaire à une chanteuse qui a goûté à la vie et qui sent les choses.
Nous sommes en 1993. Il a 23 ans, et il roule sa bohème depuis déjà sept ou huit ans, ayant quitté le confort de la maison familiale en Californie pour se frotter à la vie de la rue. Maintenant, ayant traversé le continent, il se présente, guitare à la main, avec sa belle gueule de poète, dans tous les bouges new-yorkais, donnant deux, trois spectacles par soir, offrant sa musique, sa voix, sa vie à la bohémienne new-yorkaise, en échange d'une bière, d'un café, d'un repas chaud, d'un divan dans un loft. On croirait lire Chronicles de Bob Dylan, 30 ans plus tard. Et tout comme elle avait signé le jeune Bob Zimmerman contre toute attente en '62, permettant à un grand poète de toucher un vaste public, la compagnie de disques Columbia, ayant eu vent de ce jeune homme qui remplissait les cafés et électrisait les clients le long d'interminables concerts improvisés, signe Jeff Buckley, fils du regretté Tim Buckley, disparu prématurément après un parcours météorique dans les années '70.
Mieux encore: faisant preuve d'une intuition magnifique, désireux d'enregistrer Jeff dans son habitat naturel, Columbia détache une équipe d'enregistrement pour aller l'entendre là où il se sent le mieux: dans le minuscule Café Sin-É.
"Some people they tell me I have the blood of the land in my voice," sings Bob Dylan on I Feel A Change Coming On. If so, it is a land that is almost shattered: hard-lived and careworn, yet stoic and even darkly humorous in the face of the inevitability of struggle. It is, above all, rich with ambiguity, located in the cracks between high idealism and base corruption. Dylan is the greatest poet songwriter of the modern era. In his 68th year (on his 33rd studio album) we continue to pay revenant attention, even though he wheezes and croaks, offers up Tin Pan Alley rhymes and oft-used melodies. Together Through Life is a beautifully played collection of antique blues pop."I have the blood of the land in my voice... Que voulez-vous ajouter après ça? Espèce de Grand Corbeau va! 4 étoiles dans le Guardian, 4 étoiles dansle All Music Guide, même chose dans Rolling Stone.
